On 12/4/15 3:53 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
Hi,
I have written a proposal to a) rewrite Gecko's encoding converters
and b) to do it in Rust:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13GCbdvKi83a77ZcKOxaEteXp1SOGZ_9Fmztb9iX22v0/edit
[...]
Furthermore, I think the rewrite should be in Rust, because
a) Now that we have Rust and are starting to include Rust code in
Gecko, it doesn't make sense to write new C++ code when the component
is isolated enough to be suited for being written in Rust.
b ) Importing a separate UTF-8-oriented conversion library written in
Rust for use by future Gecko components written in Rust (which would
ideally use UTF-8 internally, since Rust strings are UTF-8) would be a
footprint problem compared to a single conversion library designed for
both UTF-16 and UTF-8 with the same data tables. (For example, the URL
parser is being rewritten in Rust and the URL parser depends on the
rust-encoding library which doesn’t share data with our
UTF-16-oriented C++-based converters.)
This would essentially mandate, then, that Gecko can only be built on
platforms with a Rust toolchain. That may be desirable, but it would
probably bust some of the obscure Tier-3 platforms and it would
definitely bust TenFourFox (we can't even get clang to be happy on 10.4
currently). Not that we haven't been on borrowed time for awhile; I just
point it out for the record.
Cameron Kaiser
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